February 2009
Beginner
222 pages
5h 23m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 61. It Is All About The Data
Paul W. Homer is a software developer, writer, and occasional photographer, who was drawn into software development several decades ago and has been struggling ever since with trying to build increasingly complex systems.
—Paul W. Homer
AS SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS we initially understand software as a system of commands, functions, and algorithms. This instruction-oriented view of software aids us in learning how to build software, but it is this very same perspective that starts to hamper us when we try to build bigger systems.
If you stand back a little, a computer is nothing more than a fancy tool to help you access and manipulate piles of data. It is the structure of this data that lies at the heart of understanding how to manage complexity in a huge system. Millions of instructions are intrinsically complicated, but underneath we can easily get our brains around a smaller set of basic data structures.
For instance, if you want to understand the Unix operating system, digging through the source code line-by-line is unlikely to help. If, however, you read a book outlining the primary internal data structures for handling things like processes and the filesystem, you'll have a better chance of understanding how UNIX works underneath. The data is conceptually smaller than the code and considerably less complicated.
As code is running in a computer, the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.